Opera Max discontinued & delisted on Google Play store

Opera has decided to discontinue its Opera Max application. The company announced the change in direction in a blog post on its website. The main reason for the shut down was because Opera wants to focus on browsers and other upcoming services.

Opera Max was released as an application in 2014 which allowed users to manage as well drastically reduce data usage across applications in the Android ecosystem. The app will no longer receive updates in the future and it ‘has also been delisted’ from the Google Play Store. The interesting part about the delisting is that we could still access the app in Google Play Store at the time of writing.

The company mentioned that in the post that “The product had a substantially different value proposition than our browser products, and represented a different focus for Opera. We, therefore, focus on our browsers and other upcoming services.”

The company, however, clarified that existing Opera Max users will be able to continue using the service for the time being. A termination of server-side support will take place soon, about which users will be informed ahead.

The news of the discontinuation of Opera Max comes as a surprise as the application was awarded for ‘Innovation in Mobile First Markets’ by Meffys as recently as December 2016. Opera Max was awarded after its success in Africa, enabling users to adapt to the smartphone revolution thanks to its advanced data compression technology which helped cut data cost by up to 50% on mobile data as well as WiFi.

The app also helped save data on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube. Opera had also recently introduced a privacy mode on the app, providing an extra layer of protection on connections while saving data.